Report

Gabor Szabo

Itzik Lerner

Mikhael Goikhman

Oded Resnik

Pinkhas Nissanov

Ran Eilam

Roey Almog

Ron Gidron

Sefy Twito

Semuel Vomberg

Shlomi Fish

Shlomo Yona

Thomas Maier

Uri Itscowits

One month after the conference I was expecting some 20-30 people to
come and indeed about 20 wrote to me but in the end we were only 14.
The rest, what can I say, you missed a very good meeting !
Several people who attended told me they think this was one of
the best meetings so far and I was glad to hear that.
We had a fair mixture of simple and complicated things.
This time Dapey Zahav provided us with
their presentation room, which is actually their bomb shelter.
use safe;

They have the tables arranged in U shape which makes communication
between the people much better. Indeed we had interesting discussion
about the subjects.
We have also received refreshment from Dapey Zahav, so we filled
ourself with all kinds of cookies. Shlomi brought sugar-free
things for himself.
We touched Configuration Management issues (even before Shlomi got
there !) and I showed how I am trying to use VMware to run Windows
on my Linux machine with NAT. It will be really cool once I can
configure it.

Roey Almog started his presentation at 19:00. It was very interesting to see
how an otherwise C++ programmer picked up Perl and used it to process
30.000 word files. It was really nice to see how he did not want to
solve all the problems around the issue but looked for a workaround
wherever needed (e.g. the memory leaking issue). If you missed it you
can read his slides here:
Roey Almog: Search engine that indexes MS-Word documents

After a short break Ran Eilam took over the projector and gave us a
very clever presentation about data persistence.
First he introduced us to the problems in large scale Business
projects, the fact that some 40% of your perl code will actually end
up being SQL queries. How various modules on CPAN try to solve the
problem of data persistence and why they don't really do a good job.
Finally and for most of his presentation he showed us how to write a
very simple Object Oriented application using
Tangram
I enjoyed his presentation style very much and you can see he
has lots of things to say on the subject. Ran was wondering why in
Perl there is only one such implementation while in Java - where it
is much more difficult to implement such things there are dozens of
similar environments. We are not sure if the lack of OO persistence
systems in Perl is the cause or the result of the relatively low
number of business systems written in Perl. Nag him for the slides.

After another short break I (Gabor Szabo) took the virtual microphone
and started to give my half written presentation about debugging in
Perl. It turns out that only 3 or 4 of the 14 people present use a
debugger (if you can guess the names correctly you'll get a present)
the rest use print statements. This is in a group where most of the
people consider them self experts. (I don't want to tell you what we
really are :-). So I think teaching people all kinds of debugging
techniques was a good choice to propose on YAPC::EU::2003 and my talks were indeed accepted.

Anyway, while I was presenting I think most of the talking was done by
the audience and I personally learned quite a lot from this
presentation. We talked about why adding print statements is a bad
thing on the long run and Ran mentioned that he thinks if you need
some complicated part of the debugger it means you actually should
have written mini-tests for your code. I don't fully agree with the above
but you do have to write tests for your code. (remind me that I should
also :-)

I briefly even showed the built in debugger itself and ptkdb and the
ppl. could take a look at the set of pictures I am preparing for the
pure people in Paris. There are not many slides as a large part of the
presentation is actually live demo (of bugs). Whatever I have will be
published some time close to YAPC::EU.